university of chicago

andy pink, fairbain, missouri —

dear sirs and the generalized other,

back in december, i did the following, note: before the incident in the shadows, draft —

the punchline is at the end of the document —

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Anderson Pink

Statement of Purpose

Boston University, Department of History

I grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, in the public school system, the son of a nurse and a cabbie, and the brother to a teacher. I began my intellectual exploits at Swarthmore College where I studied the interaction between subjects and the abstract systems which overwhelm their claims to mastery and authority. At the time, I was enamored to structuralist and psychoanalytic paradigms about the interaction between man and meaning, and at Swarthmore I later confronted themes of American political history in both art and literature. In graduate school at Rochester, I pursued studies of Western ideologies (specifically: “aspiration,” “equality,” and “opportunity”) as well as topics in labor and class relations. My PhD dissertation at Rochester was a critical examination of themes of pleasure and desire in disparate works in Marxism, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction. I have published widely on these topics, as well as on film, feminism, and black studies. I currently teach philosophy, culture, and sexuality as Assistant Professor in the Department of Liberal Arts at Berklee. At Berklee, I teach seminars on Marxism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, film, economics, gender, sexuality, and technology.

My motivation to pursue a second doctoral degree is to prepare myself to concretize in history and society the philosophy and speculation of my current research. Ideally, I want to write an intellectual history of post-1945 American capital from both an historical and a philosophical perspective. I intend to apply philosophical paradigms — Marxism, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis — to the history of events in the genesis of capital in its American historical formations as economy and culture. Intellectually, I have recently turned to history because I have discovered that my research into selves and systems requires a solid foundation in history — in the material substrate of history, in the ideational superstructure of history, and in the events which unfold in history as the condition of the relationship between the subject and the Other in the abstract systems of Marxism, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis. My reasoned wager in this application is that a rigorous study of American history and historiography at Boston University will open my intellectual endeavors to a concrete specificity which is otherwise absent in my speculative work in philosophy. The questions that I propose to investigate include: how does American capital structure the histories of war and violence, domesticity and family, identity and community, and ideas and values? How are forms of capital — currency — historically developed in different periods in post-1945 America? What is the mode of writing of a philosophical historiography of capital? How can the writer historicize capital? Even simply, what is capital itself in its post-1945 American historical forms and contents?

My extensive academic training in philosophy and literature at Swarthmore and Rochester, my sustained pedagogical work at the Eastman School of Music, Concordia University, and Berklee, and my notable publications in journals in the fields of philosophy and theory (and in my upcoming book) are sure to brighten the intellectual debate in the Department of History at Boston University. My intellectual exuberance about philosophy and literature will be swiftly translated into a commitment to a nuanced — theoretical — variant of history, historiography, and the study of the proposed topic of my graduate history studies: the historical and philosophical genealogy of post-1945 American capital.

I propose a study of the post-1945 American history of capital, economics, class, and race, with an emphasis on the Western Marxism of modern intellectual history (Marx, but also Althusser, Balibar, Lukacs, Gramsci, Simmel, Weber, among others). My project would critically elaborate the work of these Marxist thinkers in relationship to the concrete material history of the events in both communist systems in the East and protest movements (black civil rights, nuclear disarmament, peace) in the West. In essence, I want to situate the abstraction of philosophy in the concreteness of history — and to do so at the nexus of a history of Western capital and its relationship to social and political struggle in post-1945 America. My focus would be industrial labor relations, corporate ownership and profiteering, labor union activism, banking and finance capital, and the disciplines of both macro- and microeconomics as historical ideological assemblages. The substrate of this work will be the application of psychoanalysis and deconstruction to the historical outline of the politics and culture of contemporary American capitalism. The challenge is to identify the nuanced points in the genealogy of American capital in which psychoanalysis and deconstruction can open critical vistas which illuminate the repressed and the margin of this history.

As a veteran of a PhD program — I am 38 years old — I understand that my plans of study are proleptic and provisional, and I am excited to participate in other fields of historical study — historiography, European history, gender and women’s history — in my development as a graduate student in progress toward a project for a dissertation. But my rigorous work as a professional academic has secured me with a firm foundation of political and intellectual commitments. My purpose in the Department of History at Boston University is to translate these fidelities to the history-writing and history-making — specific and particular — of the events in post-1945 American history. A translation of philosophical rigor and nuance into historical breadth and depth promises a unique project. A history of American capital needs such an interdisciplinary approach to society and economics, culture and ideology, and identities and communities. The horizon of my project — whatever form it will finally take — is to return philosophical speculation to historical foundation, and to isolate capital as both a Western philosophical concept and an American historical practice. My training in Marxism, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction will frame my research into the genesis of modern American capital and the formations of labor, currency, infrastructure, and the vexed capitalist relations of production at the ends of the history of scarcity.

The nexus of my studies at Boston University would be the history of American capital (labor, capitalism, and technology) in the context of contemporary American class and racial struggles in politics and economics. My focus would be the historical genesis of post-1945 American capitalist ideologies which structure concrete social practices. But I also want to complement this project with influences in intellectual history of social and political thought in both the East and the West. The Department course offerings which appeal to me include those about intellectual history: such as the course, “Enlightenment and its Critics,” which tempts my fascination with modern philosophy and the emergence of a hermeneutics of suspicion of the ideological assemblage of modern individualism and American aspirationalism, and also the course, “Religious Thought in America,” which piques my interest (sustained at Swarthmore) about the sheer variety of experiences of spirit in the United States, and also the course “Intellectual History in the US,” which would invite me to situate my own academic training in French and German philosophy in relationship to the US and its intellectual tradition. The work in courses on the “Economic History of the US” and the seminar on “Black Community and Social Change” would frame the work of my dissertation on the post-1945 history of capital in economically and racially stratified contemporary America. I would also like to enroll in the courses about the modern metropolis, the history of black radical thought, and seminars on African American History and the periods of American history.

At Boston University, I would like to study under the supervision of Alexis Peri, Ronald Richardson, Marilyn Halter, Louis Ferleger, and Sarah Phillips. Professor Peri’s expertise on Russia and the Soviet system would help me concretize the evolution of my critical thought about Marxism and its relationship to both economic policy and social formation, both yesterday in the East and today in the West. Professor Richardson’s guidance of me on the critical issues — specifically economic — in radical black thought would enable me to situate my studies of a history of capital in relationship to racial difference and the personal, structural, and institutional pressures of white supremacy in contemporary American society and economics. Professor Halter’s work on historical developments in the commodification of identity would inform my work on the concretization of an elaboration of the antinomy between self and Other, and between individual and structure, in the context of the consumer culture of contemporary capitalism. Professor Ferleger’s scholarship on the history of economic policy would inspire my own work on the American politics of social and economic justice. Professor Phillips’s studies of postwar American culture would advise my research on the cultural indications of the historical organization and deployment of post-1945 American capital. Peri’s guidance of me on Eastern theory and practice, Richardson’s introduction to me of radical black thought on social and economic justice, Halter’s supervision of me on the commodification of the self, Ferleger’s advice to me about the American political system, and Phillips’s counsel of me on postwar American economic culture will sustain a framework within which I can forge a project about the genesis — coordination, balance, and dysfunction — of Western capital in the historical evolution of its personal, social, institutional, and ideological dimensions in the post-1945 period of American history. I hope to study under these esteemed scholars, and I also welcome work with other members of the faculty. I also intend to take advantage of the limited opportunities to enroll in seminars outside of the Department. I am especially interested in work in divinity and economics — the ways in which capital has historically co-opted (especially Renaissance European) religion, and the modes by which the historical intellectual development of the dismal science of economics (especially the work of Milton Friedman) has structured the history of political and policy debate. I am a spritely and happy young gay man, and I promise to be a memorable addition to your community.

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was rejected!

andy